Federation isn't the same as "practically the same server". That's just Twitter or Reddit you're describing then, a single fully unified pot of information that is still spread out over a vast amount of individual servers for only for parallelization and redundancy reasons.

Federated applications like Lemmy are, as the name implies, federated. Not merged or unified or so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

E-mail is also a federated protocol. Imagine if every time you wanted to send an e-mail, you had to check whether your provider likes the recipient’s provider and if not, create an account at the recipient’s provider (if that’s even possible).

[–] Carighan 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh you mean like that thing email servers do when they block other email servers. Yeah imagine that. That'd be wild! 😂

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I know that and how the same people who support defederation love to complain about Gmail and Outlook blocking their home server.

[–] Dehydrated 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Exactly

[–] LifeInMultipleChoice 1 points 11 months ago

The main point of federation for me is access to more content without it being run by large corporations. If an instance gets taken over by a toxic group that is bot spamming advertisements or such I can move to another instance and the community lives on without having to find a whole new platform.